The Carhart Series

by Courtney Milan

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  Lavinia

  © Tintin Pantoja.

  The second one of Tintin’s images: Lavinia looking up from reading a book.

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  Views on Poverty

  Q. Lavinia and William have very different ways of reacting to poverty. Do you feel that is owed entirely to the fact that William began life well off, or is it also a result of the different expectations that they would have based on gender (i.e. William would be expected to earn an acceptable income, whereas Lavinia’s focus would presumably be on finding a husband who earned an acceptable income)?

  A. This is entirely because William was raised middle class. Lavinia has always been at a certain social status, and so she doesn’t really know what she’s missing. She’s used to the things she has; she doesn’t miss having new dresses and fancy food. William does.

  But there’s also a certain amount of naivety at play here, too. Lavinia has never lost anything, and so she can’t imagine what loss feels like. William has, and he knows that what he has now, he might lose again. Even though Lavinia has a lot of financial burdens, she also has a support system—her father and brother—and (although it’s only hinted at in the book) a neighborhood community that is invested in her family and their success. She can’t even truly imagine what it would be like to lose that.

  Lavinia has never been hurt the way William has, and she doesn’t know that she should flinch from it.

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  Why heroines need lawyers

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  Why all heroines need lawyers (0:39)

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  The coercion...

  Q. William tries, and fails, to coerce Lavinia. Was it difficult to navigate the moral implications of the situation given that William needed to remain a likable and redeemable romantic hero?

  A. This is a hard question to answer. When I wrote this novella I don’t know that I truly grappled with all the moral implications that were raised by the scenario. It sounds ridiculous, but questions of consent are not often dealt with by romance novels, and so it did not occur to me to think them through as carefully as I could have. I don’t think this is a bad story—in fact, I rather liked it, for many reasons, and many other readers did as well. But the author I am today, in 2014, would not have written the novella I wrote that was released in 2009.

  One of the things that I was trying to do with this novella (and whether I was successful at it, is up to the reader to judge) was to flip the gendered experience of sexual intercourse.

  In the usual way of historicals, the woman experiences pain due to the loss of her virginity, and may not feel any pleasure at all during the act. She feels all the consequences of social expectation, all the worry that if her choice is uncovered, she’ll be ruined. To the degree that she’s internalized societal belief, she may even feel dirty. The woman holds all the burden of sex: emotional, financial, social, and when the transaction is complete, she’s the one who has fallen.

  Here, William is the one who feels out of his depth. He can’t truly take any pleasure in the intercourse, and he’s the one who worries that he’s ruined himself. He’s the one who is worried about pregnancy, about the social impact. He’s the one who feels dirty as a result, and he’s the one who has to redeem himself.

  For Lavinia, love and sex are uncomplicated and simple. He wants her; she wants him.

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  Lavinia and William

  © Tintin Pantoja.

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  Lavinia

  © Tintin Pantoja.

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  Christmas trappings

  Q. Why did you choose to write a Christmas story that avoids most of the trappings of a Regency Christmas?

  A. There are no kissing boughs or trips to the forest to get mistletoe in This Wicked Gift. I asked a handful of friends to read the original version for me, and the one thing they universally said was “NEEDS MOAR CHRISTMAS!”

  So I added in a little music and the scents of Christmas pastry.

  The one thing I slipped in there to try and give it a Christmas-y feel was repeated references to the libretto from Handel’s Messiah—something that my parents would play as soon as our Christmas tree went up, and one of my strongest associations with the Christmas season.

  I was trying to be subtle about it, but apparently I was a little too subtle, because now I can’t find all the references. The only one I can say for sure is a Messiah-reference is this:

  “You?” The solicitor laughed in scorn. “Well, trust in yourself, then. You’ll not deliver yourself from poverty.”

  Which is a reference to:

  “All they that see him laugh him to scorn: they shoot out their lips, they shake their heads, saying: He trusted in God that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, if he delight in him.”

  —Handel’s Messiah, No. 27

  Yeah, that one was probably a little too oblique. What can I say? I was a relatively new author. I thought I was being clever. Woooo. Look at me, making literary allusions that even I can’t catch.

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  The best things in life are free

  Q. The value of love versus more material things is a pretty classic Christmas theme. Did you conceive of a hero and heroine so mired in questions of poverty and wealth specifically for that purpose or did it take shape later on?

  A. I had planned to write this story before my publisher asked me to do it. I had intended it to be a free short story to promote the release of my first book. I hadn’t imagined it as a Christmas book at all.

  So the line in the book about the best things being free was there as a sort of a subtle nod to what I had planned—that the story would be free, and that you could get good things (I hoped the story would be good) at no cost. That line—and the inkling of the plot—arose from the distinction between the things that were available for purchase (when the characters had no money) and the things you could get for free.

  Then Harlequin asked me to participate in the anthology and told me, oh, by the way, it’s a Christmas story. So the Christmas-theme aspects of it were not initially intended by me.

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  The story arc

  Q. William spends a lot of the story considering himself morally bankrupt as a reaction to his station in life. In the end, when he has decided to value his own honor, he happens into a way to raise his station in life. Was this intended to be a karmic thing, or was it just coincidence resulting from the necessary resolution of the story?

  A. I never intend karmic things. That would imply that people (generally) get what they deserve, and unfortunately, they don’t. The world is an awful place.

  This was actually more a question of necessity: the story, even though it was published before Proof by Seduction, was written afterwards. I had been directed to write something that would be a prequel tie-in, and there was literally only one couple who was married and appeared (well, at least half of them appeared) in Proof by Seduction.

  So I knew I needed Gareth in the story of This Wicked Gift, and I knew I wanted to end the story with William White working for Gareth. This was how I managed it.

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  Proof by Seduction: Enhanced Content

  Q. Where did you get the idea to have Jenny ritually slaughter an orange?

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  The slaughter of oranges and the almighty banana (2:25)

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  Jenny as fortuneteller

  Q. Jenny’s career as a fortuneteller is an unusual choice for a heroine. What made you decide on that?

  A. Jenny’s ca
reer was a roundabout decision.

  The very first book that I wrote—which I nominally called Flight of Fancy—featured a hero who was an ornithologist and a heroine who was…well, she had no real distinguishing features except the fact that she was clever. Her name was Claire, and she was young and needed to marry well because her brother was continually getting in all kinds of awful scrapes. There was absolutely no reason for her not to marry the ornithologist hero—absolutely none—and so it was a book without a story.

  Boy meets girl. Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy. What, then, happens for the remaining 18 chapters?

  I vaguely recognized that this was a problem, and so I invented all kinds of reasons why the two couldn’t be together. One of them was that the hero couldn’t talk to girls because he got nervous. The other was that a friend of the hero’s, named Bernie, decided he was in love with Claire for…no discernable reason. Even I, in my not-yet-a-good-writer state, recognized this was a problem. So I invented a fortuneteller that Bernie relied on, and that fortuneteller told Bernie he would fall in love with Claire. The whole book was a complete farce that ended up unmasking this poor fortuneteller as a fraud blah blah blah.

  It was not the most terrible book never to be published, but it wasn’t great.

  In any event, I was attached to this story for multiple reasons, so after I wrote a second book (also not published, and also for good reason), I came back to this one and diagnosed it with a fatal lack of romantic conflict. But I still loved the characters.

  One day out of the blue, trying to think of how to fix it, I started thinking about that fortuneteller. I wondered what would make someone choose that path. And I wrote this prologue (which doesn’t appear in the book as published):

  In Jenny Keeble’s final year in the private school her unknown parents had paid to raise her, a prim-faced instructor wagged a finger and warned that an unmarriageable woman of little fortune and excess education had only two options: She could become a governess. Or—here, a dramatic pause, and a censorious frown—she could become a courtesan.

  Mrs. Davenport intended to strike fear into Jenny’s breast. Jenny had, after all, been caught leading the other girls into trouble in the pond at midnight. Again. But at eighteen, Jenny could already swindle six spoiled debutantes into paying a penny a piece to take a dip in their drawers in March. She had no notion of fear.

  Jenny took the words to heart nonetheless. After all, she hated other women’s children almost as much as she hated their husbands. At Mrs. Davenport’s urging, she listed her primary skills: Leading others astray. Embroidering. Convincing people to part with valuable pocket money. It was a short, but encouraging, list. Jenny was capable of earning herself a living—and not through needlework.

  I had no idea what was going to happen to the story after that, but once I wrote those paragraphs, I knew that Jenny was going to be in charge. I had a few more false starts before I found the story, which my friends Tessa Dare and Carey Baldwin will explain:

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  Tessa and Carey talk about Proof by Seduction (2:44)

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  Gareth and Logic

  Q. Gareth is rigidly logical and very opposed to emotion, in general. Was it more parts fun or challenging to deal with him as a hero?

  A. Gareth was 100% fun to write! He was absolutely one of my favorite characters to put on paper, simply because it was just so much fun to bait him.

  But I think it’s a mistake to think of him as logical rather than emotional. Closing down on emotions is in itself an emotional response for Gareth. That’s something that he has to recognize as the book goes on: that it is, in fact, illogical for him to continue to avoid his emotions. The two are not opposed. They can play nicely together!

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  A London Rowhouse

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  Gareth’s arrogance

  Q. Gareth’s personality is an interesting mix of crushingly awkward insecurity and pompous arrogance. People usually think of those traits as mutually exclusive. What motivated you to write him like that?

  A. Wait, do people really think of those traits as mutually exclusive? That surprises me. In my experience, most who come off as pompously arrogant are in fact deeply insecure. Arrogance is usually overcompensation, and it’s a mistake to read it as confidence.

  This is reason #43,109 that I do not buy into the traditional construction of the alpha male. The man who tells a woman, “Yes, I know you want me. Your mouth is saying ‘no’ but your body is saying ‘yes,’ and I’m going to listen to your body” is operating from a place of insecurity.

  If he really believed his own words, he wouldn’t need to push. He’d know deep in his soul that she would come to him, that he wouldn’t have to override her judgment and taste. He is so secure in his own worth that he doesn’t have to override hers to prove that he’s right. Secure people do not need to push other people off balance; they want to help them be secure, too.

  The most gracious, giving people I have met are often extremely secure. The confident person has no need to make others feel badly about themselves. And conversely, one of the most proud, arrogant individuals I’ve ever worked with was painfully insecure.

  I’ve had people tell me that Gareth is the most alpha of my heroes, and I find this appalling. Alphas are supposed to be leaders of men, and let’s face it—Gareth couldn’t lead mice into a cheese factory.

  Most people who yell at others and run roughshod over their feelings are not leaders of men. Think about the people who have really motivated you to perform in your life. How many of them were massive jerks? And how many of them were people who respected you and your abilities, and treated you fairly?

  Yep. That’s what I thought.

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  Gareth, Jenny and loneliness

  Q. One of the things that Jenny and Gareth have in common is they both are very lonely. Would you say that Gareth’s isolation as the Marquess of Blakely is by choice, whilst Jenny’s isolation as Madame Esmerelda is forced? Or do you think their motivations and options render it more complex than that?

  A. I don’t think it’s that simple. Both Jenny and Gareth are isolated, and it’s a result of choices that they’ve made. In fact, I’d say that it’s very much the result of their vocations. Jenny’s isolated because she’s lying to everyone else, and because all her life, people have told her that she’s worse than she is. She avoids other people and society in general because she thinks that if they knew the truth about her, they would never believe her to be their peer.

  Gareth is isolated for almost the exact opposite reason—that he’s been told that he’s better than everyone else, and so doesn’t have a solid set of peers that he can relate to. He’s a marquess and a Blakely, and he keeps himself apart because he doesn’t believe that he has peers.

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  Jenny and Ned

  Q. Jenny has an extremely sweet and genuine friendship with Ned, despite the falsehoods at the core of their relationship. Was it difficult to balance that authentic affection with the facts of Jenny’s profession?

  A. In the precursor to this book there was a heroine, Claire, who had a hapless little brother. I loved the characters too much to let them go.

  In that book, Ned was the brother of the heroine, and while Ned and Jenny aren’t related in reality in this book, their relationship dynamic is very much that of older sister and little brother. I absolutely loved writing Ned and Jenny’s relationship. It was so painfully bittersweet.

  For whatever reason, it’s much, much harder for me to write relationships that are simple and uncomplicated. Difficult balances are my favorite thing to write.

  I’ve always felt that the heart of this book is as much about the two brother-sister relationships (Gareth/Laura and Jenny/Ned) as it is about
the romance between Gareth and Jenny. Because I had to reread these books to make the enhanced edition, I actually might make a stronger statement: I think the brother/sister relationships in this book are stronger than the romance.

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  Jenny and her boundaries

  Q. Jenny spends a lot of time trying to get Gareth to understand her boundaries as regards their relationship. Was her first abortive turn as a mistress the primary motivator there or was it a combination of her other life experiences as well?

  A. Jenny has spent her entire life not receiving respect. I think that acting as a man’s mistress really brought to the forefront all her feelings on this matter, but she learned, very early on, that if she doesn’t insist on getting what she wanted, she was never going to get it.

  Jenny’s insistence on independence also is driven by the fact that she has been abandoned so many times. She doesn’t trust other people to give her things, because other people go away. She is much more comfortable giving than being given.

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  Laura and Gareth

  Q. In direct contrast to Jenny and Ned’s relationship, Gareth not only resists connecting with Ned, but is terrible at connecting with his sister, Laura. He generally credits this to his grandfather’s influence, but do you feel there are other reasons?